In a Glass House

by Nino Ricci

  With my aunt’s arrival things began to change, the mood of the house, the careful eggshell order that had established itself. I thought the household couldn’t bear her blind energy, that it must shatter, and yet somehow it shifted to accommodate her. She referred to the baby as my sister, a strange thing, so intimate; what had been unthinkable before, these plain declarations of what we all were to each other, seemed in her to become merely commonplace. It was odd to have someone in the house who didn’t simply capitulate to its gloom, who so openly carved a space for herself there. Within a few days she had moved me out from the bedroom to the couch, within a few more had asked for a crib for the baby.

  “I don’t think I can go another night in the same bed,” she said. “It makes me think of what we used to do when the pigs had babies, remember that, how we had to make a little house for them in the stall or the mother would roll over and crush them.”

  “One bed was fine for three people,” my father said. “Now it’s not enough for one.”

  “Dai, it won’t cost you a thing. Mauro’s wife has a crib they’re not using, I spoke to her on the telephone.”

  But my father flushed with anger.

  “I’m going to crack your skull with that phone, then you’ll learn to stop bothering other people with your stupidities.”

  “Let her sleep with you then,” my aunt said, undaunted. “What a sight you’d make, I’ll bet you’ve never held a baby in your life!”

  I thought my father would fling something at her, so furled did he seem with his anger; but then he faltered.

  “Sì, va bene, everything’s a joke to you. Like a chicken. We’ll see if everything’s a joke.”

  Already he seemed merely to be grumbling to himself, to have made some concession; and a few days later when we came in for lunch there was a van in the courtyard and a blond-haired man in overalls in my aunt’s bedroom putting together a small bed with high, barred sides.

  “All-set,” he said when he’d finished.

  I didn’t know what to make of my aunt, couldn’t understand what things looked like from inside her, how she missed their gravity. And yet my father seemed diminished somehow since she’d come, his darkness become merely private and small, no longer taking the world in – around her he seemed to draw his anger back into himself as if to guard it from her, deferring it in his vague muttered threats to some uncertain final vindication. Tsia Teresa took to calling him Giovanni Battista, John the Baptist.

  “As if every little thing was the end of the world.”

  She spent her days in the house looking after the baby, but with an air of leisured repose like a town woman; outside now we were picking tomatoes every day, hardly able to keep up, but it never seemed to occur to her to come out and help us. Sometimes we’d come home at night and find her on the phone, and supper not ready, and the rage would seem to rise and fall again in my father, precipitous.

  “You should spend less time working with your mouth and more with your hands.”

  But my aunt always had an answer.

  “I don’t think it’s right, that there’s people here I haven’t seen for five or six years and I shouldn’t even say hello to them.”

  But what seemed to irk my father was not so much that she didn’t get things done as the languid air with which she did them, still managing despite it to make time for herself, for her phone calls, for her little projects. She had taken to listening to the radio, writing up lists of words from what she heard and repeating them over and over as if the sound of them might give up their meanings; but my father would darken with irritation at the sight of this.

  “That’s all they taught you with all your years of school, how to waste your time on this nonsense.”

  Then once when we’d fallen behind with the tomatoes my father had us pick all day under a steady drizzle. But when Tsi’Alfredo and Gino came by the next day to help load we discovered that the tomatoes that had been picked in the rain had started to rot. We had to sort through the whole load bushel by bushel to pick out the bad ones, toward nightfall still hunched over our work in the courtyard.

  “Why isn’t Teresa out here?” Tsi’Alfredo said finally.

  My father sent me in to call her.

  “You should have said something before,” she said, standing at the back door in her apron and slippers. “I’m just starting supper.”

  “Forget about supper,” Tsi’Alfredo said. “If we don’t finish here nobody’s going to eat. These tomatoes have to be in by ten.”

  “Can’t you bring them in tomorrow?”

  “Sì, tomorrow. If he misses his turn tonight it’ll be three days before they let him bring in another load. And in three days you can make a nice sauce for the pigs with these tomatoes.”

  “Well you’ll have to wait, I’ll be out in a few minutes.”

  But by the time she’d come out we had almost finished, my father already gone to take the workers home.

  “See, you didn’t need me after all. Anyway what do I know about this kind of thing?”

  “You’ll learn,” Tsi’Alfredo said. “If you were my sister you’d have learned already.”

  “It’s true, you’re worse even than Mario, I remember what you were like.”

  When my father came home he left again at once to bring the load into the factory; he hadn’t returned yet by the time my aunt and I went to sleep. But when he woke me in the morning for work I could sense the rage still heavy in him from the previous night. He was already on his way down the back steps when my aunt, her face still lax with sleep, came into the kitchen. Without a word he came up behind her as she bent to a cupboard and cracked a hand hard against the back of her head.

  “Ecc’ la signorina principessa!”

  “Oh!” My aunt had turned swiftly, alive suddenly, holding a pot slightly raised at her side like a weapon. “Have you gone crazy?”

  “They didn’t teach you how to work in Italy, ah? I’ll teach you how to work, by God, even if I have to stand behind you every day with a whip!”

  But my aunt held her ground.

  “If you ever lay another hand on me I’ll break your skull, I swear it.”

  “Dai, try it! We’ll see if you’ll always have things your own way. Not in this house, by Christ, not if you want to live under my roof!”

  “Ah, grazie! Do you think I asked to come here, to this goddamned America? To wash your dirty clothes like a servant, to take care of a baby you wish your wife had taken with her to the grave? I had my life there, did you think about that when you called me here? What life do I have now, tell me! What life will you give me?”

  For days afterwards they didn’t speak. The house assumed again its familiar gloomy silence – even my aunt seemed unable this time to bring us out of it, had defeated my father but went about the house irritable and brooding as if burdened now by her victory.

  She began to grow impatient with the baby, perfunctory, almost clumsy. Perhaps she had always been, had merely hidden this awkwardness beneath her glow of good humour; but now suddenly everything she did for the baby seemed flawed somehow. When she made up a feeding, with the powder we used now, her measurements seemed more haphazard than Gelsomina’s had been; when she gave her bottled food she seemed to stop before the baby had had her fill; when she held her she seemed unable to settle her comfortably against her, struggling with her as with some bulky inanimate thing. These signs of deficiency in her disturbed me, made her seem to lack something crucial in her character, some important instinct, like the sows who’d roll over and crush their own newborn.

  Then once when I was helping with a change, the old diaper came away stained with a small patch of dried blood.

  “The head broke on the pin, it must have pricked her,” my aunt said. But she slipped the pin into the pocket of her apron before I could see it.

  I began to watch her more closely after that.

  “Look how curious he is,” my aunt said. “As if he’d never seen a baby before.”

/>   But she seemed to understand now that some contest was going on between us. As if to put me in my place she turned the baby over to me one evening for a feeding, mockingly, indulgent; but I could tell she was quietly impressed then with my small, careful efficiency.

  “You learned all that just by watching me?”

  “Gelsomina taught me.”

  “Not bad,” she said, but she seemed put out. “She did a good job.”

  She began to come out to the fields suddenly, diffident at first, prying carefully among the vines as if not to dirty her hands, but then growing quickly more expert, some new resolve taking shape in her. She left the baby at first in a playpen of bushels at the end of her row, sending me now and then to check on her; and then gradually more and more of the care of her began to devolve upon me, till finally I was being left alone in the house the entire afternoon to tend to her while my aunt was out in the fields, my father silently acquiescing to this new arrangement as to something he neither approved of nor could oppose. I’d come to call my aunt still for feedings and changes, not certain yet what I was allowed, how far my dominion extended. But as my aunt saw I could manage these things on my own her interest in the baby seemed day by day to diminish.

  “Dai, you don’t have to come running to me for every little thing, you know how to do it.”

  What I never told my aunt was the agony for me of these afternoons alone. There was something so unreasonable in the baby then, the dangerous awkward weight of her, her obliviousness. I was never free of her, her sweaty heat, her spit, her smell, seemed not to exist at all, become merely the thinking extension of her animal need. She’d cry and cry inconsolable sometimes, make me hate her, make me wish for her death – the world seemed reduced then to her cries, the brawling chaos of them. But then when they had died into sleep I would see her curled in her crib and feel solemn with responsibility for her, understanding that she was mine in some way, that that had been decided now, and wondering then at the strangeness of her, the soft feathery feel of her skull, vulnerable as a melon, her tiny fingers and toes.

  The household seemed to shift again, its shadowy intricate web of alliances and emotion. The tension between my father and aunt had quietly become something new, an understanding: there was a rhythm now in how they spoke to each other, my aunt with her authority, her belligerence, my father with his sullen condescension, that seemed hermetic, almost intimate, a delicate weaving of their stubbornnesses into a kind of collusion that excluded me. I was aligned not with them but with the baby, who didn’t belong in our house, was awkward and unnatural there like the baby goats that farmers in Valle del Sole put with their ewes if they’d bought them before they’d been weaned.

  It was not until the first frost, into October, that the tomato season ended and I began school. Tsia Teresa set out clothes for me, packed sandwiches in my father’s lunchbox, sent me out to the end of the drive to wait for the bus. The trees had begun to lose their leaves by then, all around the landscape preparing for its alien winter; and always there were the few moments then as I waited in the October cold when I seemed to belong to no one, the life going on in the house, my aunt in her morning clothes, the sleeping baby, seeming tiny and strange as through the wrong end of a telescope, and I myself, alone there at the roadside, like an aberration in a picture, the thing when all else was accounted for that didn’t fit. There was a smell in the air once, a crispness like the sun-cleared chill of mountains, that stirred something so deep and well-known in me, so forgotten, that I felt my body would burst with the pressure of remembering; and for an instant then the past seemed a kind of permanence I might wake into suddenly as into another country, all the present merely a shadow against it, this country road, this farm, this house.

  IV

  St. Michael’s Separate School, and the church attached to it, sat on Highway 3 at the eastern edge of town, just across from the old folks’ home. The school itself was a plain, two-storey rectangular building with walls of white stucco, long rows of metal-framed windows looking into the classrooms, like the ones that lined the walls of the Sun Parlour Canning Factory, and a glassed-in passageway at one side connecting it to the side steps of the church. The church was in white stucco as well, with a squat, arch-windowed bell tower, a slate roof, and a façade whose only ornament was a small circle of stained glass near the peak of its gable. In the patch of lawn in front of the rectory, on a three-stepped pedestal, stood a stone statue of the archangel Michael, his body clad in the short, girded tunic of a Roman soldier and his hands holding a rusting metal cross-staff whose tip was plunged into a strange winged serpent at his feet.

  From the back of our farm the stark white walls of the church and school were partly visible across the mile or so of flat field that separated us from Highway 3. But the bus that carried me there and then home again took over an hour in each direction, winding me each way through nearly the whole of its erratic journey, up countless concessions and sideroads in a jagged circle that stretched as far as Goldsmith to the north and Port Thomas to the east. In winter the sun would just be rising when the bus pulled up in the morning and setting when it dropped me off in the afternoon; and on overcast days it seemed that the world the bus passed through was one where the sun never rose at all, where grey-limbed trees were forever shifting in the wind like ghosts, and the fields were always puddled over or covered with dirty patches of snow. Through this landscape the bus moved like a cabin ship, cut off and separate, sealed tight; but it was pleasant then, at the beginning or end of the bus’s run, when the bus was nearly empty, to be sitting safely inside, the heater sending a warm shaft of air under the seats while outside the rain poured or the ground was rimed with frost.

  After I got on in the morning the bus continued up to the 12 & 13 Sideroad and then doubled back along the 4th Concession to the highway again, following it for a stretch and stopping at some of the new yellow brick houses there. But finally it swung back into the concessions and lost itself in their maze-like grid, and it would seem then as if we had suddenly entered a new country, with its own different unknown customs and average citizens. The land here stretched flat and clean, the horizon broken only by the occasional dark island of pines or maples sitting strangely in the middle of a field, by the red or silver curves of silos, by the tall, steep gables of wooden farmhouses that stood, far from their neighbours, like lonely watchmen, their narrow windows gazing out over the endless fields that surrounded them. Toward Port Thomas the landscape changed again – we came out onto another highway and then entered at once into the town, smaller and meaner than Mersea, with only a few false-fronted stores at the four corners and then the houses growing gradually more weather-beaten and ramshackle until we came finally to the port, where dozens of fishing boats would be moored against the dock, some small and white and new, others with their paint peeling and strange names etched in red or black on their hulls, Silver Dollar, Mayflower, The Betty Blue. From Port Thomas we would follow the lake down into the black farmland of Point Chippewa, where the houses were more ramshackle still, their windows covered sometimes only with gritty plastic, and old farm machinery rusting outside barns and storage sheds like the remains of rotting animals.

  Our driver was a man named Schultz, a big grey-eyed German with the rough swollen hands of a peasant and the large round face of a child. In the curved mirror that gave him a view to the back of the bus we could watch his movements as he drove, the way his face screwed into a grimace each time he ground up to a higher gear, the way his tongue strained against the side of his mouth when he turned a corner or rounded a curve. The older boys did imitations of him: sometimes, on cue, six or seven of them would begin squeezing imaginary clutches and shifting imaginary gears in tandem, their voices imitating the whine of the engine. At the noise, Schultz would raise his eyes to his mirror, his face darkening.

  “Hey-you-boys,” he’d say, in his thick, slow monotone, and one of the grade-eight boys would call out, “Sorry about that, Schultz.”
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  Otherwise Schultz usually didn’t take much notice of what went on on the bus; though sometimes, if a girl shrieked or if someone threw something out a window, he’d pull up to the side of the road suddenly and jam his emergency brake up hard, crossing his arms and leaning them into his steering wheel with an air of finality and intention. For a moment the bus would go silent; and then the boys at the back would begin their entreaties.

  “Aw, we didn’t mean anything by it, Schultz.”

  “Yeah, Schultzy, give us a break, we promise we’ll knock it off.”

  And finally Schultz would purse his lips and shake his head slowly, and we’d set off again.

  When I first began riding the bus I made the mistake once of sitting in the back seat, not knowing then that only the older boys sat there. A tall, lean, black-haired boy who got on at one of the brick houses along the highway sat beside me, flashing me an odd, exaggerated grin and whipping his head back with a practised swivel to bring a long lock of hair up out of his eyes. When he’d settled into the seat he made some comment to me that I couldn’t follow, that I hoped had simply been some sort of greeting. But when I didn’t respond he spoke again, his face twisted now, mocking or angry. Then suddenly he seemed to understand.

  “Deutschman?” he said. “Auf Wiedersehen? Nederlander? Italiano?”

  “Italiano,” I said, clutching at the familiar word.

  “Ah, Italiano!” He thumped a hand on his chest. “Me speak Italiano mucho mucho. Me paesano.”

  When other boys got on the bus and came to the back, the black-haired boy said they were paesani as well, and each in turn smiled broadly at me and shook my hand. They tried to talk to me using their hands and their strange half-language. One of them pointed to the big silver lunchbox Tsia Teresa had packed my lunch in.

  “Mucho mucho,” he said, holding his hands wide in front of him. Then he pointed to me and brought his hands closer together. “No mucho mucho.” The other boys laughed.